In the current art there are two principle methods of republishing printed media for electronic use, say in the web. A first method uses the exact layout of the print page, and thus reproduces the print page on the screen. A searchable print replica is produced, often in portable document format (pdf). This has the disadvantage that most of the material is actually unreadable because the text is too small. If the material is to be read then the page has to be zoomed so that most of the page is not visible, and following articles in order is difficult.
A second method involves reorganizing the layout of the publication. A new screen-friendly layout is generated which allows for complete screen views which are readable. However the original layout, an expensive editorial asset, is dispensed with, and considerable cost goes into designing the new layout.
For a typical newspaper, retaining the print layout is desirable, and helps to attract readers who are used to the print layout to use the Internet version.
However for glossy magazines, the relationship between the text and the photographs is generally considered to be part of the essence of the magazine. Glossy magazines lose their essence if they go for a new screen-friendly layout, and yet retaining the print version makes them unreadable. It is for this reason that glossy magazines have made very use of the Internet environment to date.
Most newspapers follow the screen-friendly approach for their on-line editions. Except, perhaps, for the logo and banner letterhead of most print-medium publications, most prior art online publications, such as newspapers, journals, and magazines make no effort to adhere to their original and well-recognized print-medium page layout on their web-sites. Readers used to the print versions of these publications may be discouraged and turned off from becoming online readers unless they can quickly adapt to the broad scope and hypertext style of their favorite print publications.
If retaining the print layout, then clearly previewing an entire page at a glance and at a size which permits convenient reading is nearly impossible or, at best, requires zooming and heavy use of navigation tools as are commonly used in reading online text. Furthermore, navigation tools, used to browse prior-art web-pages representing a print-edition online, are not utilized to the best extent possible. The paradox is that if you scale a print-medium page to be fully viewable on-screen, the text is of a size to be virtually unreadable. On the other hand, if you scale it in—that is, enlarge the web-page by zooming—you can then read the text, but portions of the page will not be visible on screen and articles and advertising of possible interest will be lost from view.
Online newspapers and periodicals which maintain print-editions, generally provide a reader with a Table of Contents (ToC), section headers, and/or headlines from the original print-medium edition, but these alone usually do not give the reader enough information to make a reasoned choice of what to read. Captioned titles often do not give a reader enough information or a clear idea of what an article is about. Also, a ToC does not indicate whether an article is short or long, or whether it is positioned in a central place on a page or in a corner. A reader may not have the time, or may not particularly want to read a long article. The position of an article may indicate its importance, but a reader would not know that from a typical website ToC until actually calling up the article and reading it. By contrast in the print edition the relative importance may be very clear.
Furthermore, there may often be no indication in the online ToC as to whether the indicated article is presented on a single page or on multiple pages, the latter extending the time it takes to read an article and requiring navigating to a new web-page in the middle of reading. Finally, a ToC sometimes does not indicate if there is a photo to accompany a particular article, important information for some readers. All these factors are disadvantages of ToCs as currently used in web-based publishing.
For example, The New York Post online includes a comprehensive Table of Contents (ToC) displayed in fine print at the end of the homepage for users to browse by clicking on selected sections or features. In the first place, the small print makes it hard to read the list to begin with. Furthermore, the items, being broad descriptors, only give a very general idea of the contents to be had when navigating to a particular article page.
The Los Angeles Times on their website goes a step further and includes a link to a print edition which is displayed in a new window, but difficult to read itself unless a reader navigates to other web-pages where individual articles are enlarged.
The major articles and feature elements in the online web-page edition are captioned and have hypertext links to the full text, but do not give the same overview as the display of the print edition front page.
Other online web editions of print-medium publications provide their readers with an option to link to their print editions, but the editions may only have a vague resemblance to the original or only be symbolic. An example is the Chicago Tribune website (www.chicagotribune.com) illustrated in FIGS. 1a/b, which displays a thumbnail image of the front page of its original, print-medium newspaper and a parallel list of captioned text articles based on the thumbnail image to browse. Browsing involves clicking and navigating to another web-page where the text of the individual article is readable in full.